The Chairman of the College of Policing says that recording trivial incidents is distracting officers and undermining public confidence. The Times has more.
Police chiefs have called for a complete overhaul of the recording of non-crime hate incidents, warning that it has become an “impediment” to officers doing their job.
The Chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert of South Downs, said the Government should consider scrapping the practice in its present form, making him the most senior policing figure to criticise how hate incidents are logged.
The College is in consultation with Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, about rewriting the guidance governing the recording of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) in response to inconsistency and controversy over its misuse.
More than 13,200 hate incidents were recorded in the 12 months to June this year, according to figures from 45 of Britain’s 48 police forces.
Last month the Times reported that children were among thousands of people being investigated by police for NCHIs. One force recorded an incident against two secondary school girls who said that another pupil smelt “like fish”.
Herbert told the Times Crime and Justice Commission that the requirement to record non-crime hate incidents had become “a distraction” and was undermining public confidence in the police.
“We need to prevent harm, we need to ensure that minorities are protected and be alive to things like antisemitism but on the other hand we must ensure that police are not drawn into the trivial,” he said. “We want to apply a commonsense approach, where the police officer would receive a complaint and they would be able to say, ‘We’re sorry, we can understand you find that offensive but it’s not a matter for us’.”
Asked whether the non-crime hate incident category should be scrapped, he replied: “Potentially.”
He added: “I think it has become an impediment to the police doing what we want the police to do, which is ensure that they are preventing harm, identifying where there is risk of harm, ensuring that it can be prevented, because I think that the category itself has become controversial and a distraction from what the police need to be doing.”
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